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2019 General Election
= United Kingdom general election, 2019 = The 2019 United Kingdom general election took place on Thursday 9 May, having been announced just over 1 month earlier by Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday 4 April, after it was discussed at cabinet. Each of the 650 constituencies elected one Member of Parliament (MP) to the House of Commons. The governing Conservative Party lost the election, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the first time in living memory when a sitting Prime Minister lost his seat in a general election since Arthur Balfour in 1906, whilst the Labour party led by Jeremy Corbyn won over 90 seats and gained a majority in the House of Commons, resulting in the formation of the first Labour government since 2010. The election was called after Theresa May was forced to resign on 17 January 2019 after being unable to negotiate a Brexit deal with the EU. Shortly after her departure, Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, after defeating Amber Rudd and Phillip Hammond for the leadership of the Conservatives on 21 January 2019. Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party subsequently argued Boris Johnson had no mandate to negotiate Brexit, and that an election should be called. In addition to being the first prime minister to lose his seat since 1906, Boris Johnson became the shortest serving Prime Minister in British history, serving a mere 108 days, beating the previous owner of the title, George Canning, who served for 119 days as Prime Minister before he died. The Conservative Party (which had governed as a senior coalition partner from 2010, as a single-party majority government from 2015 and a minority government with the support of the Democratic Unionist Party, a Northern Ireland party, from 2017) was attempting to gain 8 more seats to become a majority government, and defend itself as being the largest party against the Labour Party, the official opposition led by Jeremy Corbyn. Under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act 2011, a general election had not been due until May 2022, but just as Prime Minister Theresa May had done 2 years prior, Boris Johnson for a snap election, which was ratified by the necessary two-thirds supermajority in a 539-8 vote in the House of Commons in April 2019. Johnson said that he hoped to secure a larger majority in order to "acquire a mandate" in continuing the Brexit negotiations. Opinion polls had consistently shown strong leads for the Conservatives over Labour. Many pollsters indicated that Corbyn's popularity had peaked and that the Labour party would not perform well as it did in 2017, with many predicting they would lose 10 seats, whilst the Conservatives would gain seats from Labour and the SNP. However, from a 16-point lead, the Conservatives' lead began to diminish in the final weeks of the campaign. In a humiliating and astonishing result, the Conservatives made a net loss of 78 seats with 37.85% of the vote, which was higher than the share of the vote they garnered in 2015, but there was a 5.58% decrease of the Conservative vote, whilst Labour made a net gain of 89 seats with 46.93% of the vote, a 5.91% increase (their highest share of the vote since Harold Wilson in 1966). There was a 5.75% swing from the Conservatives to Labour in this election. was the closest result between the two major parties since and their highest combined vote since 1970, at 84.78%, surpassing even the 2017 general election. The Liberal Democrats and Scottish National Party (SNP), the third-largest and fourth-largest parties, both gained vote share; although media coverage still characterised the election as two-party politics. The Liberal Democrats made a net gain of 8 seats, going from 12 to 20 seats. The SNP, which won 35 seats in the 2017 general election, which was a loss of 21 seats from their landslide result in Scotland in 2015, further declined in the 2019 election, with a net loss of 17 seats, although it did manage to win two Conservative and a sole Labour seat. UKIP, which saw their share of the vote reduced from 12.6% to 1.8% in 2017, only fielded 127 candidates and saw their national share of the vote halve going from 1.8% to just 0.9%. Plaid Cymru lost two seats, losing Arfon to Labour and Ceredigion to the Liberal Democrats, leaving them with just two seats. The Green party retained its sole seat but saw its share of the vote reduced, just as it had done in 2017. In Northern Ireland, the DUP retained their 10 seats won in 2017, Sinn Fein also retained their seven, and independent unionist Sylvia Hermon retained her seat. Labour emerged victoriously and formed a majority government, the first Labour government since 2005.